These are various attempts to parallelize John the Ripper with the use
of MPI. While these hacks might work, I find them unsuitable for
practical use. In fact, in my opinion MPI and other generic parallel
processing libraries are not appropriate for creating a parallelized
version of John the Ripper that would be suitable for most end users
(typical system administrators, etc.)
There are numerous bugs in the patches and incorrect statements in the
accompanying reports.
Thus, this collection is made available primarily for others who might
want to similarly enhance (hack) John the Ripper with MPI or otherwise,
for fun and/or as a part of their academic career. ;-)
Having that said, I'd like to thank the authors of these patches for
picking John the Ripper for their research and for making the patches
and reports publicly available (or for granting me the permission to
do so).
Update (2008, 2009): John Anderson's implementation found under
2009-bindshell/ as well as at http://www.bindshell.net/tools/johntheripper
is actually a maintained one (for two years now), with support provided
via a mailing list. You may give that one a try.
Update (2010): Magnum, P.I. has further updated the above patch, now found
under 2010-magnum.
Update (2011, 2012): Magnum's patch is now integrated into -jumbo, so
-jumbo is what you should use (if you want to use MPI at all). You will
need to enable MPI by uncommenting two lines in Makefile.
The John_the_Ripper_on_a_Ubuntu_10.04_MPI_Cluster*.pdf files were
downloaded from http://www.petur.eu/blog/?p=59 - you might want to check
that blog entry out for possible new revisions and comments.
Please also refer to the wiki page at
http://openwall.info/wiki/john/parallelization
Solar Designer <solar at openwall.com>